Kluwe plays in the NFL (hopefully he gets another shot
soon), but I am going to use a baseball metaphor.
This book came to me with two strikes against it. Strike one is that the name of the book is “Beautifully
Unique Sparkelponies,” and strike two
was the anti-jock bias that I seem to have.
Here’s where I should say that Kluwe hits it out of the
park, but I’m not going to go that far.
It’s more like a sharply hit double in the gap.
This book is mostly essays about politics and football and
life. Reading it, I had trouble getting
into it. I fillow Kluwe on a well-known
micro-blogging site, and I like his voice in those small bursts. It has some issues scaling up, and early on,
I wanted to abandon the book. There are
places the essays are over-writen and there is a whole essay about the process
of writing –which is important for a writer to think about, but maybe needs to
be put in a drawer until the Paris Review comes to interview you. There’s also a later essay where one-ply
toilet paper serves as a vehicle for an extended metaphor.
So I was ready to put it aside, but I did. It may be juvenile, but Kluwe is also really
smart. I don’t say that just because he
has the same politics I do or reads the same authors I read, but it builds in
the book to a point where you can’t deny this guy’s smarts – no matter what biases you bring to the
reading. There’s a short piece on
punting that captures that important but ignored part of the game in a way that
makes you rethink the punter’s craft.
Over the course of the book, it feels like he finds his voice. That or I just became accustomed to his
unique style and cadences. I think that
if I wrote a book, it would be a lot like “Sparkleponies.” I hope it would be.
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